2023 Annual report Oral Health and Dental Care

Activities:  

Collaborative projects have progressed well, including the feasibility study to support people with severe mental health accessing oral health and dental care services.

Recruitment of primary dental care teams to research has always been difficult and since the COVID pandemic has worsened. Recognising this problem, a group of SIG dentists has been awarded grant funding by NIHR SPCR to understand the reasons and develop evidence-based ways so as to improve engagement of these dental teams in research. This activity will be an essential step in building capacity within primary dental care for research. However, before research can address oral health inequalities, reviewers of the above grant highlighted the importance of further research to address patient recruitment.    

Future plans: 

1. Support delivery of the NIHR SPCR grant to develop approaches to improving the engagement of primary care dental teams in research.
2. Seek funding for a study (following-on from (1)) to develop approaches to improving recruitment of patients to studies in primary dental care
3. Continue to forge links with NIHR oral & dental care’s primary care champions to identify areas of inequality where research could help improve services to the public and to increase opportunities for ECRs in primary dental care.

Evidence of Impact and how affiliation with SAPC has helped the SIG:

1. NIHR HSDR funding and Consensus statement on improving oral health in people with severe mental illness (both the dental and mental health SAPC SIGS were involved and the findings disseminated in an invited oral presentation at the SAPC ASM - https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/media/lancaster-university/content-assets/documents/fhm/spectrum/Oral_Health_Consensus_Statement.pdf
2. This project has recently resulted in inclusion by NHS England of Oral health in physical health checks for people with SMI. 
3. Collaboration with the medicines optimisation SIG (Ian Maidment) led to a research prioritisation exercise in the role of pharmacists in oral health advocacy. The SAPC chair Prof Carolyn Chew-Graham was also involved with this project. This has just been accepted for publication in journal of oral rehabilitation.
4. An Academy of Medical Sciences funded feasibility study of an antimicrobial stewardship intervention for primary dental care has been successfully completed and is being written up for publication. The only thing preventing it moving forward to full-scale clinical trial is difficulty recruiting primary care dental teams to research. The NIHR SPCR grant to improve the engagement of dental teams in research (identified above) resulted from  this finding.